While 2004 was hardly a landmark year for the environment there
were enough
victories, large and small, to help keep the faith. And yes we
admit it, there was definitely the occasional "told you so" quietly
uttered in Greenpeace offices. On the other hand, there were more
than enough challenges to be faced down over the year.

The year started with our absolute least favourite man of 2004 -
President Bush. In 2003 we highlighted the import of illegal timber
to the US from Brazil. So obviously that made us the real
criminals. We were
slapped with a lawsuit under an obscure prostitution law
(whoever thought that orange jumpsuits were so fetching?) that
hadn't been used since the 1800s. In response we sent a
clear message about the ridiculous case, but the legal machine
rolled on.

Early
2004 also saw us demonstrating how dragging a huge net between two
boats to catch a few fish off the coast of the UK and France is a
really bad idea when a lot of
dolphins also end up dead. We achieved some progress in the UK
but continue to push for a European ban on this destructive fishing
method.

In February a UN Treaty banning the
12 most polluting chemicals on the planet came into force after
years of hard campaigning and fighting off sleep in late night
negotiating sessions. In an uncharacteristic moment, the
US Pentagon issued a report declaring that climate change is a
bigger threat than terrorism. What, the Pentagon agrees with us?
Well not entirely - the Pentagon's only suggestion is giving it
more cash for fighting the wars a warmer world will foster.

In March
Bayer withdrew GE maize from the UK bemoaning the fact that
regulations wouldn't allow them to make heaps of profit. Awww,
bring on the violins. Back in 1999 we were taking action against
the GE maize that Bayer finally withdrew in 2004. Obviously not
wanting to be left out of the trend, Monsanto dropped development
of
GE wheat in May.

In May it was time to face the music, and answer those charges
about daring to protest against illegal timber imports to the US.
The
judge threw out the case because the Bush administration tried
to claim we had broken obscure laws from 1872 designed to keep
brothels from tempting sailors off ships. The law was patently
irrelevant, so we concluded Mr Ashcroft must have been feeling
nearly as desperate as those sea-bound sailors to think he could
get away with it.

Out
on the high seas we were exposing the destruction of the underwater
equivalent of rainforests - seamounts, through a ridiculously
unsustainable fishing practice called (don't laugh now) bottom
trawling. We collected a
stunning array of bycatch which we beamed live to the UN
meeting in June. "We don't like bare bottoms," we told them, and
over 22,000 cyberactivists agreed with us. In fact, Mr Squid - the
lurid purple face of the bottom trawling campaign - became an
international celebrity and unauthorised versions of him popped up
all over the web, and even in the New York Times! But even Mr Squid
was seemingly no match for the countries who blocked any moves to
temporarily ban bottom trawling. Never fear, they haven't escaped
the tenacious tentacles of squiddy yet.

Talking of stupid destructive technologies, one of our
favourites was trying to extract oil from rocks by using a huge
amount of energy to squeeze, heat and process the rock, turning
dirty oil into an even more polluting fuel - shale oil. After
getting millions of dollars in subsidies and still failing to make
money an
Australian company pulled the plug. Pity it took US$275m and
four years to discover that squeezing oil out of rocks is a mugs
game.

In
July the intrepid winners of the
cyberactivist Iceland Whaling pledge set off on the Esperanza
to protest Iceland's whaling policy. Soon after, the Icelandic
government announced that plans to kill 250 whales this year were
shelved in favour of a hunt of only 25 minke whales - a massive
step backwards in the face of domestic resistance, absence of
market, and international pressure - especially painful to their
bewildered tourism industry. We'll be back in 2005 to make sure
Iceland scraps whaling plans entirely. Help by taking
the pledge.

In
August Ford thought it could get away with
scrapping its fleet of electric cars (ironically called Think
cars, something Ford apparently wasn't doing) after demolishing
legislation requiring it to produce alternatives to gas-guzzling,
climate-trashing SUVs. Thousands of people wrote to the company and
within two weeks Ford was forced to admit it wasn't the greatest
publicity and it would sell the cars to Norway instead. Not that
this changed the fact that Ford's current range of cars is less
efficient than their 1920's model T ford! Three cheers for such
corporate 'leadership' on the environment!

The
big story of September was the 7000km shipment of US
radioactive weapons grade plutonium from the US to France. The
deadly shipment travelled across the Atlantic despite the threats
of accident or terrorist attack. Amongst the protests, huge media
coverage and rough treatment by French authorities of activists
protesting the shipment a real glimpse of true sentiment emerged. A
shipment guard asked in broken English for a Greenpeace t-shirt
from our campaigner. Not having a spare, our campaigner literally
offered him the shirt off his own back and the guard became the
proud owner of one slightly used, sweaty "Stop Plutonium" t-shirt.
(We assume it's for strictly out of office wear.)

After far too many years of putting off action, humanity took
the first global step to tackle climate change when
Russia finally ratified the Kyoto protocol (motivations aside)
bringing it into force. It was vodka toasts all round in the
Greenpeace office and raucous choruses of "From Russia with Love".
At least half an hour went by before someone said "Ah but this is
only the start of saving the world from climate change, now the
real hard work starts". Who said environmentalists were killjoys?
That's a whole 30 minutes of feeling happy with the world!

In October the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kenyan
environmentalist and human rights campaigner
Wangari Maathai. "The environment is very important in the
aspects of peace because when we destroy our resources and our
resources become scarce, we fight over that," she said. We couldn't
agree more, which is why November brought such bad news.

Bush
got elected again and it's back to doom and gloom and dreading what
damage will be wreaked on the planet in four more years of Bush's
war-mongering, international treaty-trashing, big business rules
policies. But running off to a Pacific island isn't really an
option, as Bush policies will help flood many of those left
unchecked anyway. Nope it's time, as our
head honcho in the US said, to: "Spend some time being pissed
off. Feeling shock. Mourning. Then we have to act. Our cause is
just. We cannot afford to be defeated, or to be defeatist. Too much
is at stake: our planet, our future and the legacy we leave to our
children."

So are we better off than 12 months ago? Some big companies did
the right thing on pollution and protecting forests while others
like
Dow,
Disney and
Exxon most definitely didn't. Huge protected areas were created
in the Amazon while forests and their inhabitants like the great
apes were being wiped out faster than ever in the Congo and
Indonesia. In 2004 it seemed finally that the public debate on
climate change moved on from 'is it a problem?' to 'how do we
tackle the problem?'.

But again the world's politicians seemed behind the eight ball
when they spent two weeks in December arguing (again) about climate
change rather than resolving to do something. Unfortunately most
politicians don't get the idea that tackling climate change is
vital for the future of the planet. As one of our campaigners wryly
remarked on the BBC: "Will our lifestyles have to change? If
quality of life is measured by the size of the engine of the
quasi-military assault vehicle the housewife drives to the shopping
mall, then yes, but if we're talking about basic comforts,
transport and general services, then no."

Will 2005 be any better for the planet? Who knows, but what is
for sure is that we will be out there fighting for a better world
and we're sure going to need a lot of help doing it. Here's
hoping......